Roundup: Silencing and Cooling Systems for Hard Disk Drives

Today we are going to talk about six solutions for cooling 3.5-inch hard disk drives. We will check the cooling efficiency and acoustic performance of products from GlacialTech, Scythe, Tuniq, Xilence and A.C.Ryan.

Contemporary hard disk drives in 3.5-inch form-factor get faster, more complex and larger in capacity by the year. Therefore, the manufacturers monitor their temperature mode as well as their acoustic performance vey attentively, because these two factors are just as important to users concerned with security of their data as the HDD speed or storage capacity. Anyway, those who are still not quite satisfied with the HDD thermal performance or acoustics can resort to special devices that could be considered coolers, if they only served to lower the HDD operational temperatures.

However, besides lowering the HDD temp, these devices also lower the level of noise generated by the drive, and in some cases the latter function is of even greater priority than the former. Home file-servers and HTPC that become increasingly popular these days, require not only very quiet processor and graphics card cooling solutions, but practically noiselessly operating storage devices, as well. The interesting thing is that the user actually notices that his or her hard drive produces some whistling or crackling sounds only after they managed to get all of their other system components to work at their quietest. This is when lowering the noise from the hard disk drive becomes a serious challenge.

The third obvious function of devices like that is the ability to place 3.5-inch HDDs into 5-inch bays of your system case, when there are not enough 3.5-inch ones left. Today’s expensive system cases do not really pose this problem, because they normally have more than six 3.5-inch bays, which is more than enough for most users out there. Nevertheless, considering that you replace the system case nearly 10 times less frequently than the rest of the components, it might be a pretty common situation when there will be not enough 3.5-inch bays. So, this is when the devices we are going to discuss in our today’s roundup come in very handy.

For our today’s article we managed to collect six cooling boxes for HDDs from GlacialTech, Scythe, Tuniq, Xilence and A.C.Ryan. The primary goal of our today’s article is fairly simple: to find the best device of the size in terms of acoustics and cooling efficiency, also keeping in mind their reliability, ease of assembly and use, ergonomics and price. So, let’s get started.